


until we find the home page

by glissandos



Category: Stray Kids (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Cats, Curses, Fluff, Found Family, Halloween, Happy Ending, Holiday Cheer, Home, M/M, Magic, Some angst, Strangers to Lovers, a bit of, and, probably an unrealistic plot lol, warmth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-26
Updated: 2020-10-26
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:41:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27184678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glissandos/pseuds/glissandos
Summary: A man just crawled out of his fireplace, and he isdefinitelynot Santa.He is, however, claiming to be a character—a handsome prince—from a fantasy novel that Jisung just finished reading. And he is also apparently here to break Jisung’s curse. (Hold up. Curse?)
Relationships: Han Jisung | Han/Lee Minho | Lee Know
Comments: 30
Kudos: 390
Collections: MINSUNG SEASON: Colourful Autumn 2020





	until we find the home page

**Author's Note:**

> Part of the minsung season event, here is its [twitter](https://twitter.com/minsungseason)!  
> (a big thank you to its mods for organizing this and for being so accommodating with me haha!)
> 
> Inspiration for this fic comes from the color orange—it is generally associated with fire and warmth, and with that comes a cozy sense of home. So this fic is about finding where you belong and finding... home. 
> 
> i also aptly listened to seventeen's [home](https://youtu.be/R9VDPMk5ls0) on repeat while writing this, lol
> 
> enough said, i hope you enjoy!

A man just crawled out of his fireplace, and he is _definitely_ not Santa.

Jisung wants to say his imagination has unlocked a whole new level of creativity, but this is also definitely real.

So instead Jisung freezes halfway to the kitchen, mutely inching backward until one of his heels hits a wall. Perhaps this is how he dies—alone in his house, the only witnesses to the crime being the stranger himself and the cracks of moon peering through his half-open blinds. 

“Good evening,” the stranger casually says, standing up and brushing the ash off his arms. “Considering the current time I would be more inclined to say good night, but that is more of a term used for goodbyes and we have only just begun with the introductions.”

“Um,” Jisung croaks out. The midnight snack he had left his room for is now the last thing on his racing mind. “Hi?” 

There is surely a high chance that a gun or a knife is whipped out here. Jisung’s phone is in his pocket—he could call the police—but for some reason Jisung’s back feels stuck against the wall instead, like he’s waiting for the stranger to move before he moves—which is incredibly dumb, obviously, because Jisung has absolutely no idea who this person is or how they even got into the fireplace. And into his living room. 

At least the person seems calm and… friendly… if the tone of their words is anything to go by.

And it’s not the time for this but the worst part of it is that the stranger is _handsome,_ even if his fashion choices are maybe a bit questionable. Mussed hair, defined cheekbones and jawline, alluring eyes… but he’s wearing overalls over a hay-ridden t-shirt… and is that a straw hat? 

Suddenly Jisung is thrown off-kilter. This seems oddly familiar. 

“Alright, I should just be honest here,” the man says after a moment of contemplation, taking off his hat and running a hand through his dark hair. 

This is definitely familiar. A man dressed like a farmer but the lack of tan lines and the way the man’s voice has an elegant lilt to it… there are bells ringing in the back of his mind, but Jisung just can’t pinpoint where.

“I am here to break your curse,” the strangely-familiar stranger tells him. 

“Wha—” Jisung starts to say, because… what in the world does this man mean by a _curse?_

And then the man takes two bold strides forward and _kisses_ him. 

It lasts no longer than three seconds—Jisung feels incredibly plush lips pressing against his own and the brief warmth from the stranger’s presence—and then it’s gone, and Jisung is left processing it all. (God, what _is_ going on? He should have pushed the stranger away…)

“There,” the man continues briskly, taking a step back. “The curse is broken—the rift that the dark magic was coming through should be sealed, and you should be able to return the book now.”

“What- what curse? Book?” Jisung stutters out. (This should be creepy, right? He should definitely call the police.) Against his own will, he can feel the heat flaring to his cheeks.

The man looks at Jisung like Jisung’s just grown another head. “Obviously this book, what do you mean?” he crosses the living room, reaching back into the fireplace and procuring a book from inside. 

Oh. _That_ book. 

For the past week, Jisung thought he was hallucinating, thought that maybe he was seeing things because he was sleeping less. Because he’d checked out a book from the library for leisure reading but when he’d finished it and tried to return the book it somehow kept ending up back with him. Jisung _watched_ that book get deposited into the return box, but then when he returned home, there it was, sitting atop his desk. Taunting him.

And then even stranger events started occurring—Jisung swore he heard undecipherable whispering one night as he lay awake in bed, and then various objects around the apartment started disappearing and reappearing in different places. Like the old Doraemon plush that showed up on top of his blankets—its wide smile now threatening and creepy—one morning when Jisung was certain he’d stuffed the thing into a dusty storage box for good.

After the second time that Jisung tried to return the book and came back home to it sitting innocently on his desk, he tried to burn it. Okay—it’s not like Jisung would ever want to burn books, even that one—but he swore it was the root of all his problems and he needed them to stop.

But the book wouldn’t even burn! Not when he put a lighter to it, and not when he threw it into the fireplace as fodder for a big fire even though he wasn’t particularly keen on heating his apartment up even more in the middle of August. 

Jisung didn’t even believe in the paranormal, but… the past week changed things. 

He’d come to the conclusion that he was being haunted. (As seen by Exhibit A: the stranger currently holding up the very crisp and clean book, somehow untainted by the soot from the fireplace.)

… the book was a good read, though. A fantasy novel whose protagonist—a wizard named Chan—had performed a teleportation spell wrong, leaving him stuck in the countryside for a long time, where he’d discovered the presence of some strange magic lurking under the cornfields… and then somehow he’d stumbled across the rift to a whole alternate world, whose dark magic was seeping in through holes in the fields. After a long adventure he’d finally been able to patch it—though not without the help of powerful wizards in the alternate world as well as from some unlikely others in his own world, one of which was a prince from the city visiting friends in the countryside where he wouldn’t be recognized… and…. wait….

“Hold up,” Jisung says, his brain coming to a screeching halt. “Are you… Lee Minho?”

“The one and only,” Prince Lee Minho says, appearing elated to be on the other end of Jisung’s revelation.

Jisung blinks rather bewilderedly. “Please tell me you’re joking.”

The silence from the other end confirms that this is indeed not a joke.

“Okay. Okay. Just give me a moment,” Jisung says, stumbling across the living room to the sofa and slumping into it. “What… is going on?” he says. “Who are you, really?”

“Prince Lee Minho? You said it yourself,” Minho tells him, raising a delicate eyebrow. 

Even out of Minho’s own mouth, that is still hard to believe.

A character from a fictional book standing very real in his own house. And he’s a disguised prince, no less.

Jisung stares at the fireplace, its doors pushed to the side from when Minho had opened them from the inside and pulled himself out.

“I know, I could have chosen a better time to spring this all on you,” Minho says, lowering himself into the sofa next to him, leaving a good amount of space between them. 

Jisung closes his eyes. Keeps them closed for a good few seconds. 

“Sorry, are you tired?” Minho worriedly asks. “Oh gosh, I am really sorry.” 

_Not tired,_ Jisung thinks. _Just pretending this isn’t real._

“Hey, at least the curse is broken, right?” Minho keeps talking into the silence, continuing as if Jisung isn’t completely unresponsive. 

“What curse?” Jisung finally asks. 

“Somehow the book must have been spelled to curse the next person that opened it,” Minho explains as if this should all be normal to Jisung, which… it isn’t. “I am assuming what happened to you is similar to what happened in the book, just on a milder level—the curse probably caused a gap in the timespace so dark magic could leak through, and it probably freaked you out.” ( _Freaked out_ is an understatement, Jisung thinks.) “So now all that’s dealt with,” Minho says.

The book isn’t really the most of Jisung’s worries right now, though. What he’s really thinking about is the _curse,_ or rather… “So you broke that curse by… coming out of the book… and… and…,” he averts his eyes, “ _kissing_ me?” Jisung finally asks, incredulously. 

“Those were the terms required to break the curse, yes,” Minho replies matter-of-factly. “At least they were easy to fulfill,” he muses, almost to himself. “If it were a _true love’s kiss_ it would have been far harder, and if it involved some sort of quest to find ingredients that also would have been quite bothersome.”

“Okay,” Jisung slowly replies. “Thank you for that, then. Good to know that I wasn’t going crazy.” _Do you regularly go around kissing people to break curses?_ He also wants to ask. Instead, he points to the book still in Minho’s hands, asking the more pressing question on his mind. “Um… are you going to go back into the book now, or…?”

“You really do not like me all that much, do you?” Minho bluntly asks. 

“What?” That’s not it,” Jisung quickly replies, scrambling for words. Nevermind the fact that Prince Minho had been one of the most likeable and charming side characters of the book, in his opinion. “I just meant- I mean… the curse is broken now, right? So… yeah, I don’t know how this works, but… are you going to go back in…” Jisung trails off. 

“About that.” Minho draws out a long sigh. “I do not think I can?”

_Oh no._

“And what are those white beans in your ears?” he continues, reaching a curious hand out.

Jisung instinctively flinches away. “They’re for listening to music- Wait—don’t change the subject—what do you mean you don’t think you can go back?”

“Yeah, sorry. Sorry,” Minho sincerely repeats, and his face falls. “This is going to be a problem.”

\---

“But… don’t you want to go back, though?” Jisung asks the next morning when Minho is still there—he slept on the sofa, after Jisung brought him some loose clothes to change into.

Minho’s face is unreadable. He slides the book over the kitchen table to Jisung’s side. 

“Skim through it,” he says. 

Jisung does, and it takes him a while to figure out what Minho means. After he thumbs through a good chunk of the pages, he is astonished to find that Minho’s name has been wiped from the story, never appearing even once.

“Wow,” Jisung murmurs, “What are you going to do? I mean… like… this is a book but are you really gone from it? How does that even work? Is your family going to miss you?”

“I did not really want to go back, anyway,” Minho quietly says. “After I went to the countryside, at some point I planned to run away. And I was the third prince in line. Not like my parents paid me that much attention.”

“So this story and this world is just going to act as if you were never there?” Jisung asks, frowning. That doesn’t seem right. 

Minho shrugs, spoon swirling in the bowl of cereal Jisung had poured for him. “I am not the main character. I am not the magical wizard. I do not know how it works. And I really do not know what I can do about it.” 

Then his spoon drops, metal clinking loudly against the side of the bowl. “Oh no. What _am_ I going to do?”

\---

So that is how Jisung ends up harboring a storybook character in his apartment.

 _Temporarily,_ he emphasizes, until they figure out some alternative. 

Minho keeps saying he doesn’t really want to go back into the book, and maybe Jisung sympathizes quite a bit, but it’s not like it’s really realistic for him to house this guy forever. 

He tries asking Minho for the specifics once, but the only information he’s gotten is that curses that transcend across multiple worlds are weird—Minho doesn’t really know how he got out of the book, but somehow he was aware of the fact that he left his world and came into this one with the purpose to break a curse. 

(And Jisung gets his hands on another copy of the book and sees Minho is gone from that, too.)

So even though he’s had his own copy of the book for far too long, Jisung decides to keep it and pays the library the cost to replace it. Maybe there’s something special about the one he has that might allow him and Minho to figure something out.

\---

“Perhaps I should find a job,” Minho says a couple days later. Jisung thinks it’s probably because there’s only so much for him to do inside the apartment, especially when Jisung is gone for half the day on weekdays since he teaches music at the local elementary school. Jisung thinks that introducing Minho to the internet had probably been the most exciting thing for the latter—Minho had been enraptured by Jisung’s old laptop and the power of websites and search engines. But he also doesn’t have much else to do _other_ than that. 

“Um. Alright,” Jisung replies, caught off-guard by the abruptness of the sentence into the silence of the apartment. “Do you… have something in mind?” Because Minho doesn’t really have any… _qualifications,_ so things would be tricky. Although Jisung would certainly appreciate any job Minho could find, since he knows he’s definitely spent more on groceries the past two weeks.

Minho doesn’t reply, and Jisung sees that it is because he’s occupied by some website where he can make cats bounce by dragging the laptop cursor.

 _Bruh,_ Jisung thinks. 

This is fine.

\---

So Minho doesn’t seem to have found a job yet, but once Jisung comes home to find the apartment immaculately cleaned… and also smelling strongly of smoke. 

“I am so sorry,” Minho profusely apologizes. “The servants and chefs always did that sort of stuff back in the castle, and I felt bad because I have to keep relying on you for food, so I wanted to try myself…”

 _Bruh,_ Jisung thinks again. But hey, at least the house is clean. 

And it’s not like Jisung is much of a cook either. He shows Minho how to make some egg fried rice from leftover white rice and whatever vegetables he can find in the fridge because it’s kind of a staple for his dinners and because it’s so simple it’s almost hard to get wrong. 

“Just a warning that this won’t even come close to any of the meals you must have in your castle,” Jisung says when the prince takes a spoonful of Jisung’s go-to dinner (alongside cheap noodles). Not that Jisung really needs to warn him anyway—Minho’s been here for a few weeks now and he knows the sort of stuff they eat. Although Jisung has been trying a little harder because he doesn’t want to broadcast super unhealthy habits.

“I like it!” Minho tells him anyway, and spoons more rice into his bowl. “It is so warm.”

“What?” Jisung asks, confused. “Did you not eat warm meals for dinner before?” Even as the words come out of his mouth, he knows it can’t be true—he’d even read that dinners were always extravagant meals in the royal family.

Minho shrugs because his mouth is full.

“It made me feel warm,” he tells Jisung later, and Jisung doesn’t know what to make of that, either.

\---

Another time Jisung comes home and there is the recording of some classical waltz playing in the background. Minho is in the living room—sofa and coffee table pushed to the walls to clear out space—and his feet step side to side as his body sways to the rhythm. 

It’s kind of like ballroom dancing but solo and more entrancing, with the way Minho’s hands also move like water. The only thing is—he looks incredibly miserable.

Jisung clears his throat and Minho’s movement immediately halts. The slow waltz continues playing in the background, the quiet striking of piano keys sounding even more dejected without a dancer to accompany it, and Jisung hovers in the hallway, feeling out of place in his own home.

“It has already been a few weeks since…” Minho begins.

Jisung nods. 

“You must be tired of me now, right?” he asks. 

Jisung thinks about it—he’s definitely not tired of Minho, but he doesn’t really know what he _does_ feel. 

Minho takes the silence as a negative, mouth forming a grimace. “I feel homesick,” he quietly says, “And yet I also never really felt at home back… back in the book, anyway.”

Jisung is kind of aware of this—not only had Minho insinuated something similar previously, but he’d also noticed that in the story; when Chan—the wizard—interacted with the Prince Minho in the story, the latter always had a friendly yet somber air to him. And he had known that Prince Minho was frequently overshadowed by his two older brothers, and that he never really enjoyed life in the castle (hence why he’d so easily jumped at the task of helping Chan and the prospect of adventure). 

“The only people I really miss are not even people,” Minho despairs. “They are my _cats,_ ” he continues, laughing wryly. “Technically not my cats since they are strays but I hope they are doing well,” he says.

“Oh yeah!” Jisung perks up. “Soonie, Doongie, and Dori, right?” he asks. He recalls the names because Minho’s fondness for the three cats had stood out to him while he was reading the story—while the prince had been visiting the countryside he’d always talked about missing his feline friends back at the palace. (And perhaps because he’d also grown fond for Minho’s character because of this.)

“Yeah! I even named them!” Minho’s face lights up and he grins back at Jisung. “You remembered?” 

“Of course,” Jisung says, maybe too easily. This should be unnerving because Minho came in as a stranger except Jisung feels like he already knows the other because he’d quite literally read him like an open book.

“I hope they are doing well… is it bad that I do not even really miss my friends in the countryside?” Minho says, mouth flatlining again. “I hate this,” he bluntly continues, frowning. 

“We’ll figure something out,” is what Jisung eventually ends up saying, but he thinks he is even more clueless.

\---

_magic is real???_

_About 2,930,000,000 results_ _(0.62 seconds)_

_magic across multiple worlds_

_About 43,200,000 results_ _(0.52 seconds)_

_person came out of a book magic_

_About 657,000,000 results_ _(0.58 seconds)_

_cursed book person came out and kissed me to break curse_

About 10,200,000 results (0.88 seconds) 

_asjdfklsdjfklaFDSJKL_

Your search - **asjdfklsdjfklaFDSJKL** \- did not match any documents.

Ironically, the more Jisung tries to narrow it down, the more the first results of his searches point him to _other_ books, and Jisung feels increasingly lost because he wants to help but he has absolutely no idea where to start. 

So once again he ends up heading back to the place where it all began—the library.

\---

It turns out that there are a surprising number of books on investigating seemingly paranormal phenomena. More surprising is that the majority of them seem to suggest evidence for magic existing in their world. Jisung is intrigued by a particular book that discusses the use of spells and incantations, and tucks the book into his elbow to check out later. 

But what’s even more surprising is when Jisung steps past one row of books into the next aisle and sees… _what._

“Minho?”

Sure enough, Minho whirls around between the shelves, looking like a deer caught in the headlights. 

“What- what are you doing here?” Jisung asks. “How?”

Minho inches backwards. There is a book with a blue cover in his hands, and he rather conspicuously moves his hands behind his back so that it is hidden. 

“Well, you said you were going out, so I… snuck out after you left?”

“To the library.”

“It _is_ within walking distance?”

“Didn’t I say I was going to the library? You could have come with me.” Jisung curiously replies. 

“Oh really? Oh… wow… I must have missed that,” Minho says, avoiding eye contact. Something is definitely suspicious. It’s not like Jisung is Minho’s babysitter or anything, but they do live together in a sense, so he feels a bit hurt because Minho is definitely not telling him something.

Minho shifts and a slip of folded paper—it’s yellow and looks like some sort of flyer—falls out of the book behind him. Minho scrambles to pick it up, and Jisung grows even more curious. But he supposes it’s not in his place to pry.

“Come find me when you want to go, okay?” he says instead. 

Minho nods. 

Jisung burns with curiosity for the rest of the hour, but when Minho turns up again the book he had been holding is gone. 

\---

At least Minho seems to be in a better mood the next day, and Jisung decides to let the whole thing go, saving his own research with the spell book he checked out instead—Minho had been so busy the other day trying to ensure Jisung didn’t figure out what book he had been carrying to worry about what books Jisung was borrowing anyway. The only problem is that the book seems to be a fluke so far. Half the incantations involve summoning spirits and demons, and even though Jisung doubts the existence of either he’s not about to try.

“Have you ever danced before?” Minho abruptly asks him when he walks past the living room the next day. The furniture is pushed to the side and Jisung thinks Minho has already been dancing for a while.

“Uh… no?” Jisung hesitantly replies. 

“Try it with me,” Minho beckons him over, pulling up a video on the old laptop Jisung had given him, and that melancholy waltz music is soon flowing out of its speakers again. To be honest, it is very depressing.

“I’ll do it if you play music that doesn’t sound so… sad,” Jisung bluntly tells him.

“Oh. Okay,” Minho says, and pulls up some other waltz but at least the tempo has some more energy to it and the melody doesn’t make Jisung want to sit in his room and stare blankly at the wall as he contemplates life… or all this fictional (but real) stuff that’s suddenly taken over his life instead (what _has_ his life come to?).

“Jisung?” Minho asks, and suddenly his hand is being lifted to Minho’s shoulder. Minho loops his own hand around Jisung’s waist and Jisung can feel each digit even through his sweater and.. well... the last time they were this close was when Minho was supposedly breaking a curse. Not that Jisung should really be thinking about that. Minho joins their free hands together and then he grins and Jisung. “Stop being so stiff,” he says.

“I don’t know how to do anything, though,” Jisung says. When did it get so hot? It’s definitely warmer than it should be for late-September. 

“Relax,” Minho says. 

“I’m _trying,_ ” Jisung tells him. His muscles are just tense because he may be musically inclined but he’s never danced before, not because of Minho’s proximity or anything.

“Now I’m just gonna step and you’re gonna step with me,” Minho says, suddenly pulling Jisung forward as he takes a step back. 

“Oka-ay,” Jisung says, voice pitching higher with the unexpected movement. 

“Now to the side, and then forward, and then to the side again,” Minho says, and it _is_ easy enough. Just stepping in different directions, and it is sort of calming once he gets used to the pattern of footsteps. The music washes over him and his thoughts stop drifting because they are just repeating step-step-step-step.

“Ah, I only did this with girls back at the palace,” Minho suddenly muses. “I think I like this more, though.”

“What,” Jisung laughs nervously, flustering. It’s not something the book really focused on, but Jisung _had_ picked up on the fact that Minho never seemed to be interested in any of the female characters in the story. 

“I also like the smaller living room space, it is quite cozy,” Minho laughs. “The ballrooms were so big and they felt so empty even when they were filled.”

“So I’m guessing you didn’t really like balls?” Jisung curiously asks. 

“Just not my cup of tea,” Minho replies. “I think my favorite ball was the one where I managed to sneak outside early on with a plate of food and I went and talked to the cats instead,” he says, grinning. “I do enjoy dancing. But all the diplomatic talk with people is not so fun.”

“You do dance very well,” Jisung tells Minho, recalling the way Minho’s body had moved alone in the living room that one day he’d come back from work.

“Really?” Minho asks, beaming. “Thank you. I think that might be the first time someone has told me that.”

“No way,” Jisung replies dubiously, because _no way._ Objectively, not with a face like that and not with such control of his movements—there’s just no way. 

Minho laughs dismissively. “My brothers always danced better anyway,” he says, a faraway look in his eyes. Then he sighs and soon the warmth is gone as Minho pulls away to turn off the music, leaving Jisung just standing there.

“Too much time has passed,” Minho says into the heavy silence. “I don’t know whether I want more to go back or whether I want to try and somehow craft a new life for myself here.”

“It’s.. a month and a half? It hasn’t been _too_ long, yet?” Jisung quietly replies.

“Yes, but…” Minho trails off. “It is not like I can stay with you forever, right?”

\---

One morning Jisung walks into the living room as Minho is waking up. He catches him just as Minho places a hand behind his neck and rolls his head back and a loud cracking sound echoes across the room. 

“The sofa isn’t that comfortable, is it,” Jisung says. Minho jerks up, surprised, as his head turns around to face Jisung and his neck cracks again in the process and Jisung almost laughs despite it all. 

“No, no, it is fine,” Minho hastily rushes out. “Don’t worry about it.”

Jisung regards him with a deadpan expression. “You’re not going to be a burden or anything. You can share my bed if you want.”

“Share your bed?” Minho’s face flushes red, from the tips of his ears down to his neck. 

“Not like _that_!” Jisung jumps to reply. “What the heck! I didn’t mean it like that! My bed is probably big enough and I just didn’t want you to kill your neck, okay?”

“Okay,” Minho replies, but Jisung pretends not to notice how long it takes for his ears to return to their normal shade.

\---

He’s not sure how Minho did it, but somehow he’s attracted a couple stray cats. Minho crouches in their tiny backyard and coos at them and they draw closer even though he hasn’t even brought out any food for them.

“Look,” Minho grins happily at him. “I think they like me.”

It’s kind of ironic but Minho, not the cats, is what causes Jisung to crack. They go to the pet store to get a small bag of food, which Minho eagerly places outside along with a bowl of water. 

“I just don’t want to bring the entire neighborhood of cats here,” Jisung warns him. “So don’t put out too much.”

Minho pouts, and Jisung can’t decide whether he should look at that or the cats. “That’s why they came to _me_ and not you,” he responds. “And only these two have come by so far, don’t worry.”

He turns out to be right. Only those two cats seem to drop by often—a grey tabby and a calico—and they easily capture Minho’s attention for long periods of time. 

“You should befriend them too,” Minho tells him once. 

“Maybe,” Jisung replies. He isn’t the cat person that Minho is, but he knows that if he does then he might crack even more and end up spending too much money on the cats when he’s already been struggling since Minho dropped down his fireplace.

“Then who’s going to take care of them when I leave?” Minho whispers, but Jisung catches it. 

“Oh,” Jisung can only say, and just like that the mood’s dropped and the silence is thick and tense.

“I did not name them either,” Minho continues. “I am afraid I would get too attached if I did.”

“Oh,” Jisung says again, feeling awfully empty inside even though Minho is the one who’d been spontaneously thrown out of his world.

\---

The next morning, he makes sure to wake up extra early (which is a hard feat, since Minho wakes up early everyday even when _Jisung_ is the one who has work) and pours a fresh bowl of food and water, staking out the patio until one of the cats—it’s the calico this time—slinks by. 

“Hi,” Jisung says. The cat eyes him warily and—Jisung watches with much disappointment as—slinks past him and the food into a bush instead, then disappears. 

_For Minho,_ Jisung determinedly tells himself anyway. He wakes up early again the next morning and the calico spares him a glance this time before passing by—improvement, he supposes, and Jisung mourns a little less for his lost hours of sleep.

When Minho pokes his head outside that morning he raises a brow at Jisung’s waiting form, and Jisung shrugs. “Gotta meet the cats, right?” he says, feigning indifference.

“Right,” Minho says quietly, but he has a soft smile on his face as he ducks back in.

\---

“You stick _knives_ into pumpkins as tradition?” Minho asks incredulously. 

“And you’re making it sound worse than it is,” Jisung says, grabbing his keys from the counter.

A puzzled Minho follows him out the door— “But… why?” he keeps asking, for once forgetting to be intrigued by the way Jisung’s car works (the characters in the book had used _horses_ and other more magical means to get places.)

They arrive at the patch a short while later, Minho trailing behind Jisung like a lost kitten as the latter searches for a good pumpkin to carve. If he’s being honest, Jisung really has outgrown the tradition, but it’s kind of fun to set his creations out on the doorstep so that when his students occasionally come by for trick-or-treating they can excitedly point it out.

“Is everyone getting pumpkins just to… _carve…_ them?” Minho warily asks, sidestepping a particularly enthusiastic child struggling to carry a pumpkin that is far too big for her. 

“Stop saying it like we’re murdering them!” Jisung tells him.

“We should try making pumpkin pie from them instead,” Minho thoughtfully says. “Then at least they don’t go to waste.”

“We can do that with the carved pumpkin too,” Jisung throws back. “Since I’ll have to dig out most of the inside before I carve it anyway, then you can use that to make a pie.”

“I might actually,” Minho returns. “Also, I think that girl is going to drop her pumpkin.”

“What—” Jisung turns around just in time to see the same girl from earlier, her large pumpkin slipping through her arms and landing in the dirt with a loud thump. Luckily, it has neither split open nor landed painfully on her feet, but she looks crestfallen anyway.

Minho snickers. Jisung elbows him in the side. “Why are you laughing!” he hisses.

“Sorry,” Minho replies, but even though the noise stops the upturn of his mouth is still there. And it is terribly attractive. And maybe Jisung’s only noticing this now because Minho doesn’t smile often—the thought of his uncertain future and where he really belongs always seems to be lurking on the forefront of his mind. 

“Just don’t laugh when I drop this pumpkin on you,” Jisung decides to quip instead, and the ensuing roll of eyes and higher quirk of lips is enough of a satisfying response.

\---

“Can I add to it?” Minho asks after Jisung has carved out pretty much the entire face. 

“Thought you didn’t like the idea of sticking knives into pumpkins,” Jisung prods him.

“You’re twisting my words,” Minho replies. “Please?”

“Knock yourself out,” Jisung tells him, carefully handing the small knife over. 

“Okay. Please do not stare at me while I do it, because I will probably mess up.”

“I’m watching you so you _don’t_ horribly mess it up.”

“Ah, of course,” Minho nods. “Too bad.” He rotates the pumpkin so the carving surface is away from Jisung and scrunches his face up in concentration as he slowly sticks the knife in. 

“I feel like you’re going to mess it up anyway,” Jisung says. 

“Shhhh, stop distracting me.”

As it turns out, Minho does not mess it up. When he turns the pumpkin back the face has now donned a set of upside-down v-shaped cat ears, and tiny slits for whiskers. Unevenly carved, but they add a nice flair nonetheless. 

“I hope the cats see this,” Minho tells him, and Jisung’s mood dampens just a little because Minho still refers to them as “the cats.” He still hasn’t named them. 

And Jisung is almost tempted to name them now instead, because they’ve finally warmed up to him and started making jabs at the food bowls even when he’s around. He doesn’t want to admit it but he’s grown quite fond of them too, and also of the way Minho’s eyes melt once when he catches Jisung outside trying to feed the grey tabby cat from his palm.

\---

Jisung finds a slip of paper in the trash a few days after Halloween. It’s not like he regularly looks in the trash, but he’s peeling a tangerine and so he happens to glance inside and he sees the paper face up unfolded sitting in there. It’s pale yellow and Jisung suddenly remembers the odd library incident from a few weeks past, so he picks it up with as little of his fingertips as he can and skims over the sheet.

 _Interested in working at the library? Talk to the front desk!_ Is the header, written in bold letters. There’s handwriting on it, too, and Jisung hasn’t seen enough of Minho’s to be sure but he thinks it’s his. But the only writing he even sees are penciled numbers that he can barely read—because they’ve been aggressively scribbled over with a dark pen. 

“What’s this?” Jisung asks, confronting Minho in the living room.

Minho’s eyes widen just barely, and his hands freeze over the keyboard of Jisung’s old laptop—the stillness incredibly noticeable because within the couple months he’s been using it somehow he’s learned to type as fast as Jisung. “Nothing,” he says. 

“Minho.”

“I do not know what you want me to say, okay? Just don’t ask about it,” Minho’s voice rises and then wavers on the last word, and he fixes his eyes to the laptop screen, determinedly ignoring Jisung. 

“But it’s clearly not nothing,” Jisung retaliates. 

“Fine. It is not nothing, but it does not matter,” Minho says. 

“I want to know, though,” Jisung pushes on. Perhaps it’s a bad idea, but it’s been almost three months and he still never knows what Minho is thinking half the time. And a small part of him believes that he has a right to know after he’s let Minho live with him rent-free for so long. “Is this related to that day you were being all weird at the library?”

Minho doesn’t reply. 

“Whatever,” Jisung mutters, and throws the paper back into the trash. 

\---

“I am sorry,” Minho says later that night as he hovers in the doorway of Jisung’s room. “I acted out earlier, and that was horrible of me to do so, especially after all you have done for me,” he apologizes.

Jisung sighs. “I’m sorry too. I wasn’t thinking either, so I’m not going to try and get you to talk about something anymore unless you want to,” he replies. 

“Cool,” Minho says awkwardly. “Um… thank you for all that you have done, by the way.”

Jisung fights a stupid grin off his face. He can’t stay mad—he hates staying mad. “Just take the bed. I know you’re tired,” he says, wishing he could have the same self-control over his sleep habits like Minho does.

“Ah,” Minho replies. “I didn’t realize you had picked up on that.” 

“And I’m hoping you didn’t just apologize because you didn’t want to go back to sleeping on the sofa,” Jisung raises an eyebrow.

“Obviously not. Thank you for everything,” Minho says. “And thanks for the warm blankets,” he adds, already burying himself under them on his half of the bed.

“Of course it’s the blankets,” Jisung laughs. 

“They really are so warm,” Minho tells him, rolling around until he has wrapped himself in a blanket burrito. “So warm,” he repeats, smiling softly at Jisung and Jisung’s heart trips once in his chest. 

“You better not fall asleep like that,” he replies instead. “Otherwise I’ll have to untangle the blanket burrito and I’ll definitely wake you up later.”

Minho furrows his eyebrows at the sentence, mouthing the words _blanket burrito_ to himself. “Okay,” He tells Jisung, the single word sounding strangely thoughtful. 

Sure enough, when Jisung comes back into the room after showering and brushing his teeth, the blankets are no longer wrapped in layers around Minho’s sleeping form. But his hair is all fluffy and mussed up from his blanket-rolling endeavors and he has a small smile on his face. 

“Good night,” Jisung is suddenly inspired to say before he crawls into the other side of the bed. 

He doesn’t notice it, but Minho’s smile grows just the slightest bit bigger. 

\---

“Rise and shine!” Minho cheerily greets him, face hovering above Jisung’s own when he wakes up. 

Jisung curses, jerking back down. “You nearly gave me a heart attack.”

“I tried making pancakes and I think they taste good,” Minho tells him. “You should get up so you can try them.”

It’s so early—and when Jisung says early he actually means it this time. He thought getting up to feed the cats before work was early, but this is even earlier than cat feeding time. 

Jisung groans, turning around and rolling over his blankets in the process, sinking his face into the pillow. 

“Blanket burrito,” Minho whispers, like he’s testing out the sound of the words on his tongue, and the quiet yet delighted tone of his voice makes something stir in Jisung’s stomach but he’s too groggy to even think about it.

“Yup. You’re right. It’s warm,” Jisung says, already halfway back to dreamland in his bundle of blankets.  
  


Minho doesn’t even get him back up. Jisung wakes up half an hour later to his alarm, untangling himself from the wrapped blankets and forcing his body out of the bed.

“Pancakes?” Jisung asks as he shuffles into the kitchen.

“They are probably cold now,” Minho tells him. “But I didn’t want to wake you up again since you looked like you really wanted that sleep.”

“Sorry,” Jisung says, and now he feels bad.

Minho shrugs. “I fed the cats too, so don’t worry about that.”

“Great,” Jisung says gratefully, lifting a couple of the cold pancakes onto his plate and warily sticking them in the microwave. They come out warmer and not crusty, which Jisung counts as a success. 

“Congrats on your kitchen debut,” Jisung teases him. “Even reheated these still taste good.”

“Thanks,” Minho says, grinning abashedly. “I just searched up pancake recipes though. Guess I got lucky they turned out well.”

“Any homemade pancakes are better than the frozen ones from the grocery store,” Jisung declares. “Hey, I know you already fed them, but do you think the cats would eat these?”

“ _Should_ they be eating pancakes?” Minho returns.

“Dunno, but I think Ghost might like them, she’s—”

“Ghost?” Minho curiously asks. 

_Oh. Oh shit._ Only recently had Jisung only given the cats names in his head, he swears. And just now one had to slip out. “I mean the grey tabby cat,” he corrects, hoping it sounds smoother than it feels.

The ensuing subdued expression on Minho’s face reminds Jisung for the first time in a long time that Minho’s not supposed to be a permanent fixture in his life. 

The thing is—that’s also been slipping his mind recently. Like here, Minho making pancakes and everything, it’s so easy to forget just how exactly Minho arrived, because it feels like he’s starting to fit in. 

And maybe Jisung doesn’t really mind sharing the apartment anymore.

\---

Two days later, when Jisung gets back home, he just senses that something is wrong. 

“Hey,” Minho says from the couch, looking up from the laptop and directly at Jisung. One of his legs is bouncing against the cushions and he looks strangely nervous. A feeling of dread swoops into Jisung’s stomach as he sets his bag on the ground.

“Hey,” Jisung echoes. “So uh… what’s up?”

“I think this shouldn’t go on any longer,” Minho says. “I am… I’m a horrible person,” he continues. “You don’t deserve this.”

“Minho, what?” Jisung demands. “You can’t just say that. You’re not a horrible person, either.” He levels Minho back with an equally piercing stare. “If this is about you feeling like you’re leeching off of me, you’re not.”

Minho doesn’t reply, but he does pull out a book that had been wedged between cushions. It’s that stupid cursed book, the book he came from and the book that had been sitting innocuously on the coffee table without moving from its spot for weeks. 

“Alright,” Minho says, standing up and walking over until he is in front of Jisung.

“Hold this.” He opens the book to the first page and pulls Jisung’s hands up, setting the book there and Jisung supposes he doesn’t really have a choice. 

“Minho, what’s all this about,” Jisung nervously asks, stomach still swirling with anxious anticipation.

Silent again, Minho pulls a pen out of his pocket and uncaps it. 

“ _What_ are you doing,” Jisung rushes out. Minho starts writing in the book, and as Jisung furrows his eyes and tries to read the upside-down letters, a hand is suddenly hooked under his chin and Minho leans forward and fucking kisses him. 

Against his will, Jisung’s eyelids flutter shut and his brain short-circuits midway through its concentrated deciphering. This is so different from that first kiss. The first one had been a curse-breaking kiss—short and sudden and unfeeling, and the only thing Jisung really remembers from it is Minho’s soft lips. This time is just as unexpected and Minho’s lips are still just as soft, but now they desperately gnaw at Jisung’s own like that is all they know how to do. 

Jisung almost gets lost in them until he feels the back of the book digging into his palms and the pressure of Minho continuing to scratch letters into it.

He pulls away and looks down and sees that Minho’s written his own name on the first blank page. Lee Minho, the dark ink says. 

“What are you doing,” Jisung breathes out again.

“Sorry,” Minho apologizes, recapping the pen and placing it in the crack of the opened book.

“What…” Jisung repeats like a broken record.

“This is for the best,” Minho quietly says, and it sounds like he’s trying to reassure _himself_ more than Jisung. 

And then he starts fading away.

Jisung suddenly has a very bad inkling of what is going on. 

“Wait- wait,” Jisung says. He presses a thumb to the ink and tries to wipe it but it has long since dried.

“Thanks for everything,” Minho tells him, smiling like everything is not wrong and that’s wrong because everything _is_ wrong. 

“Fuck!” Jisung hisses out, carelessly dropping the book to the floor and grabbing onto Minho’s wrist instead. Somehow even though it is translucent it still feels warm and solid.

But in that moment Jisung realizes that he _wants_ Minho to stay here. 

Minho’s eyes widen. “Are you crazy?” he shouts, except since he is disappearing the words only come out as a whisper. 

Jisung looks down where his hand is wrapped around Minho and sees that _he_ has started to fade too. And the last thing Jisung sees is his apartment disappearing under his feet before he blanks out.

\---

When Jisung comes to, it is in the fanciest, most expensive bedroom ever. The mattress he is on makes him feel like he is floating and the pillows are so soft that Jisung kind of wants to just get back to catching up on sleep until he sees Minho sitting on an armchair across the room and remembers what happened. Yikes.

“Are you crazy?” Minho says again, a mix of anger and tired frustration in his voice. “What were you thinking?”

“Where am I?” Jisung asks, sitting up on the taking in the intricately decorated drapes parted to the side of an incredibly large and crystal-clear window. 

“My _room_ ,” Minho bites. “Back home,” he says, but the word _home_ comes out of his mouth like it has a sour aftertaste. “Congrats,” Minho says drily. “I finally figured out how to come back and you had to mess it up by following me here.”

“What?” Jisung retorts, reality sinking in. “It’s not like I knew that would happen. And you didn’t give me any explanation, you just kissed me— _again—_ and started writing your name into the book! I just panicked and grabbed your hand, how was I supposed to know that somehow the book would pull me in with you!”

“You should not even have been able to come back with me,” Minho says, voice quieter and it is evident he doesn’t want to argue with Jisung. “I only wrote my name,” Minho tells him. 

“Great,” Jisung replies, that familiar feeling of dread swishing around his stomach. “Am I part of the story? Am I stuck here now too?”

“I really hope not,” Minho tells him. The anger he had earlier is all gone now, replaced by eyes dripping with regret. “I should have thought this through,” he says. “I am so sorry. This is such a bad situation and it never would have happened if I were not being stupid.”

“Glad that’s cleared,” Jisung says drily. “Next time you want to just disappear talk to be about it first.” 

Minho looks away. “Maybe I should have just left without waiting for you to get back first,” he says. “Then you would not be here.” 

Somehow that hurts more. _What about staying? Did you consider that option?_ Jisung wants to ask, but he knows it isn’t that simple either, especially when this is the world Minho had spent most of his life in.

Although.

Jisung thought the kiss was part of it? Like a necessary ingredient for Minho to go back into the book? But it seems like it’s… not? Or Jisung’s overthinking.

“Well. You have a nice room,” Jisung says instead. 

“You can drop it,” Minho tells him. “This is my fault and now everything is even worse.”

“Wake me up when you figure things out,” Jisung says, flopping back into the fluffy pillows. 

“It is five in the afternoon,” Minho says. “Um. You’re gonna sleep anyway. Okay.”

Jisung closes his eyes. He knows he’s not going to fall back asleep anyway. And the silence in the room is suffocating, but he has nothing to say. What does one say when they’re teleported to a completely different world, with the frightening possibility that they’re stuck there?

“Jisung,” Minho says.

“What.”

“I might actually have an idea,” Minho tells him. “Your world may not have much magic but ours does, so it might be easier here to reverse things.”

“So…” Jisung prompts him.

“Let’s go ask Chan—he is the wizard here, after all,” Minho says. “Protagonist to the rescue again.” And there’s an underlying tone of self-deprecation in his voice that makes Jisung just want to be done with it all, and wish he never checked out that stupid book from the library.

No. That’s a lie. He’s still glad he met Minho in person.

And now he’s going to meet Chan too. Exciting. Less exciting when he considers the reason why.

\---

They make a pit stop first. 

Once outside the palace—whose hallways are also scarily big and lavished with furniture Jisung is scared to touch—Minho swerves, jumping down into the perfectly manicured grass instead of continuing down the polished stairs. Jisung hesitantly follows until they end up at what he supposes is a garden. Minho crouches behind a bush and starts making these clicking noises, and after a few minutes of Jisung wondering what exactly Minho is doing a cat shows up… and then another. Until three cats are looking up at them with inquisitive eyes and twitching ears.

“Hello,” Minho says, smiling for the first time that afternoon, “I am so glad you still remember me.” He bends down to give each cat a scratch before standing up and brushing his hands off. “Sorry I can’t stay longer,” he tells them, evidently reluctant to leave, “but I will be back later, okay?”

Jisung hovers silently behind him, feeling just as conflicted but for so many different reasons.

\---

They get to Chan’s place by _carriage._ Because—oh yeah—Jisung forgot that this world doesn’t really have cars. Neither Jisung nor Minho really speak during the hour there, which is great. At least the scenery is nice; there’s far more greenery in the unindustrialized outskirts of the city and the sky is a beautiful shade of blue that looks incredibly pristine.

Chan’s house is in a small town and looks fairly drab but only stands out because it is big—multiple rooms sprawling across the row and a large front yard that is overrun with tall plants and wildflowers creeping into the walkway up. 

… But it turns out Chan—who is amazingly nice and attentive and every bit of the hero like the book had made him out to be—also has no idea where to start.

“Magic that spans multiple worlds is a bit of a puzzle to even the best of us,” Chan grimly informs them. 

_I’m fucked,_ Jisung thinks. He can’t begin to imagine how Minho must have felt appearing in his fireplace all those weeks ago. 

Chan turns to curiously regard Minho. “How did you even get back here?” he asks. “This entire story is so strange—it’s like I never missed you while you were gone, either.”

Minho sighs. “I was gone from the book completely. It’s not like I was meant to be missed.”

“So how’d you get back?” Chan presses. “Perhaps if we figure that out then it could be linked to a similar method for Jisung here.”

“Well… apparently magic _does_ exist in Jisung’s world,” Minho slowly begins, each word carefully leaving his mouth like he’s only trying to say the minimum. “I searched for some… books… and all I had to do was find the right ingredients, mix them into an ink… and use that ink to write my name in the book?”

“You found it in a book from the library?” Jisung pipes in. “No way. I looked everywhere. And the library incident was ages ago. You _just_ figured it out?” 

“Ah. Yes. But you didn’t really look everywhere,” Minho replies. “Anyway.”

“When did you figure it out?” Jisung asks again. Is it possible that Minho had known for over a month and just never said anything?

“How did Jisung end up in here too?” Chan joins in with his own question, which is, of course, the one that Minho chooses to answer. 

“Not sure,” he replies. “I only wrote my name. Jisung just clung on at the last second. Still should not have been possible for him to come back with me.”

“Okay, we might be here for a while,” Chan says. “Using spelled ink is an interesting idea… but Jisung himself didn’t come here from another book, so we wouldn’t have anything to write in.” He frowns thoughtfully standing up to browse the expansive row of bookshelves lined up against his walls. “Would you two like some tea while you’re here?”

“Green?” Minho asks. 

“If that’s what you want,” Chan replies. “Jisung?”

“Sure,” Jisung says. “I’ll just have the same.” It might help his stomach that has been bothering him for a short while now—and he’s not sure if it’s something he ate earlier or if it’s just the mess of knots of anxiety and stress gnawing at him from the inside.

Chan heats up the water, then comes back into the living room to pick out and pore over some thick books. When the tea is done, Jisung and Minho sip it in silence that is only interrupted by the rustling of pages being turned.

“Do you have anything with you… other than what you’re wearing, that belongs back in the other world?” Chan asks him. 

“Oh!” Jisung checks his pockets before realizing he’d set his phone on the table by the front door when he’d got back. “Nevermind.”

“Speaking of clothes, Minho,” Chan says, casting him a pointed glance, “you should probably…”

“Ah…,” Minho looks down and realization passes over his face. “ _That’s_ why the guards probably looked at me strangely when I asked for the carriage earlier,” he says flippantly. He’s still wearing one of Jisung’s oversized hoodies with a graphic design on them and loose pants Jisung had bought for him. And, yeah. That clothing doesn’t really belong here. 

That is the least of Jisung’s worries though, especially when his stomachache seems to have suddenly gotten much worse—this sort of wrenching pain that stabs at his gut relentlessly.

“Wait… I don’t feel so well,” Jisung says. “Sorry. I know the priority is getting me out of here but I _really_ don’t feel so well… where’s the bathroom?”

Now both Chan and Minho turn to look at him, concerned. “Bathroom’s down the hall to the left,” Chan says. He steps back into the kitchen, inspecting the tea leaves in his container. “Shoot, I don’t think my tea is that old…?”

“You looked fine earlier? But you are really pale now,” Minho points out, worry seeping into his voice. He sticks a hand to Jisung’s forehead and pulls away, confused. “Your temperature feels normal, though.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think it’s the tea. I just don’t feel well,” Jisung says, and somehow makes himself walk to the bathroom even though he feels like his energy is being drained by the second.

A light overhead turns on when he enters—perhaps spelled by magic?—and Jisung closes the door behind him, leaning against it as he regards the mirror. 

Damn. He does look pale. 

Jisung tries to smile at himself in the mirror. Shoots a couple finger guns. He still looks incredibly pale—almost ghostly. 

And then Jisung realizes he _is_ ghostly. Through the mirror, he can just barely see the outline of a hook and towel that should have been blocked by his head, and it’s getting… clearer. 

Jisung has almost no energy left. “I think I’m fading back to my world,” he says out loud, and it sounds like a quiet underwater murmur to his own ears. 

“Bye,” Jisung whispers instead, relief finally washing over him as Chan’s bathroom and the light above fizzle out of existence.

\---

The relief doesn’t last very long, even when he wakes up to his own cold hardwood floor pressing against the back of his head and has the frigid realization that Minho isn’t back here with him. Obviously.

Jisung hopes Minho and Chan will figure out what happened. He doesn’t think he locked the bathroom door behind him, so they would find it empty… and hopefully they would be able to assume that he had been pulled back into his world—where he belongs. 

He sits up—all his energy is back—and sees the book and pen that he’d thrown on the ground, the book mashed upside down and ungracefully folding some of the pages. 

Jisung picks it up and glances at the open text in front of him and the first words that catch his eyes are _Prince Lee Minho._ Minho’s inked name is gone from the first page but he’s definitely back in the book, his name scattered in print throughout the chapters. 

So everything is back to being as it should be.

\---

Everything is back to being as it should be.

And Jisung feels… emptier than he should be. The apartment is emptier than it should be.

It all feels so wrong. 

Maybe Minho was right—maybe the prince had overstayed his welcome. Because after all the time Jisung spent with him, now that he’s back alone again in the apartment feels too lonely, the sofa too big, the rooms too cold. 

_Minho is a fictional character,_ Jisung tells himself. It’s not right to feel this way. Except Minho isn’t just a fictional character. Wasn’t. He’s just fiction again now, right?

He had originally set the book on the coffee table after fully regaining his senses. But every time he leaves his room he sees it sitting there and feels like it is mocking him. So he sticks it in his bookshelf instead, wedges it in the corner where he’ll be less likely to see it. He is tempted to throw it in the fireplace again. Perhaps it would actually burn this time now that the curse is gone. 

But Jisung leaves it in the bookshelf, and silently hopes as he sleeps.

\---

The cats are here. That is the one right thing in this world. They are here like they are every morning and Jisung feels a mixture of consolation and desolation as they nip at the bowls and purr into instead of shy away from Jisung’s soft and desperate touches.

Ghost is the grey tabby because he blends in with the shadows. Pumpkin is the calico because back at the end of October Jisung had caught her on the front porch once, having a staring contest with the carved cat face on the pumpkin. Or maybe she was just enraptured by the tiny candle and billowing flame visible through its hollow eyes. But just like that, the names had easily slipped into Jisung’s head. And he grew attached.

Luckily Jisung had only slipped up with the names that one time in all of his conversations with Minho. He doesn’t think Minho remembers this, either. So hopefully without these names Minho had not grown too attached.

(Hopefully, Minho will miss these cats a little less than Jisung misses him.)

\---

Jisung cleans his apartment. 

It’s somewhat of a coping method, to occupy his mind with menial tasks and to feel the satisfaction of dust pushed away and stains wiped off, but he also cleans because he just wants to. It has been a long time since he has done so and discarded materials have started piling up with the dust on his desks and shelves and there are probably lots of fliers and junkmail that he can throw away.

Jisung organizes his room first, beginning with his desk and papers. Vacuums the floor. Dusts the bookshelf in his room clean too, and tries not to let his eyes linger on _that_ book. 

The bathroom isn’t too dirty but Jisung wipes down the sink anyway. And he doesn’t really use the living room that much so Jisung just gives the floor a customary vacuum. 

The kitchen floor is probably the dirtiest and Jisung mops up all the grime, then finally clears his food stores for probably the first time since he moved in. He finds an old rotting tomato in the bottom corner of his fridge, and throws away some old cans of non-perishable food items that truly are past their due date.

Then he stumbles across a sheet of paper stuck under the bag of flour. The note itself is pretty flour-dusted, but Jisung already recognizes the handwriting even before he brushes the flour off over the trash can.

 _Good Pancake Recipe!_ It reads. _Copying this down so I can easily come back to it later :D_

 _There will never be a later,_ Jisung thinks bitterly, harshly staring down at the paper as all the biting emotions he had been keeping away rush back in to suffocate him with their scathing heat. 

But that quickly fades away back into the usual empty coldness, and he pins the note to his fridge instead of crumpling it into a ball and dumping it into the trash. He tries making those pancakes the next morning. 

This time, now that they are hot off the pan and he doesn’t have to microwave them, Jisung thinks he understands what Minho meant when he said the food made him feel warm. Because the pancakes are oblong and slightly burnt but they are still fluffy and homemade and fill him with a sense of comfort.

If only he had someone to share them with.

After searching online to confirm that it is okay in moderation, Jisung feeds tiny bites of leftover pancake to the cats instead, and their satisfied meows allow that pleasant warmth to live on for just a bit more.

\---

The apartment has a no pets policy but winter this year seems extra cold and Jisung sees Pumpkin shivering outside once as she is feeding so he sets out to the hardware store and comes back with some planks of wood and nails that he hammers into a somewhat satisfactory shelter and straw that he lines the inside with. He sets it by the sliding door, and waits.

Later, seeing Ghost and Pumpkin curled up inside all nice and cozy melts that extra winter coldness. 

\---

The holiday season arrives and Jisung decides to go to the staff party on Christmas Eve even though he normally declines the offers. It’s not like he really knows any of the teachers well, except for Changbin—the other music teacher who handles the older elementary school kids. 

But the cheer kind of gets to him and even though he doesn’t interact with many of the other teachers the pleasant chatter and carefree laughter is uplifting. After a round of Secret Santa Jisung ends up back home with an ugly sweater that is actually soft instead of scratchy and actually not too ugly—no cursed block text and just alternating snowflake and zigzag patterns.

All in all, it isn’t too bad. After checking that the cats are warm outside, Jisung ends up curling up on his bed later that night with a book—he hasn’t been able to pick up fantasy again just yet but this science fiction novel had caught his eye—and finds himself quickly captured by the plot, finishing multiple chapters before he conks out for the night.

\---

On Christmas morning Jisung wakes up to the bed shaking slightly and he thinks there’s been an earthquake. 

Then he sits up in bed, rubbing his eyes… and _holy shit_ he still must be dreaming. Waking up while still within a dream is possible, right? 

Across his room, many of the books are in disarray on the ground, toppled from their shelf. That would explain the shaking.

And the early sunrise is just starting to creep in through the cold winter haze, rays kissing the face of the man who is pulling himself up amidst the pile of said fallen books.

“The fireplace was roomier,” Minho says, gingerly picking up the book he had just come out of and setting it on top of the shelf. He offers Jisung a wavering smile. “Terribly sorry about your bookshelf.”

Jisung has never gotten up so fast, leaping out of his bed to envelope Minho in a fierce hug. And then he breaks into tears as he shoves his face into his shoulder because Minho is _here._ Not written in fiction but standing in reality. Here.

“Jisung,” Minho’s voice cracks as he squeezes him closer. “Please stop, or else I think I might start crying too.”

“You came back,” Jisung sniffs. 

“I did. Ahem.” Minho pulls away just enough to look at Jisung with shining eyes. “I was wondering if you would be willing to have me back here. Indefinitely?”

Four months ago Jisung would have been crazy to say yes, but now he barely has to think about it. “Yes,” Jisung nods vehemently. 

“I know I should still find a job and all, but at least I have been learning some recipes from the cooks to try out and I also left the cats back at the palace with a trusted friend and I just wanted to get away from that place and I missed the cats here too and I missed _you_ ,” Minho quickly rushes on. “Please?”

“I already said yes,” Jisung grins, “Of course.”

“Thank you,” Minho tells him, taking his hands in his and repeating the words again with dripping sincerity. “Thank you so much.”

Then he furrows his nose. “Did you go to sleep in that sweater? It is kind of…” he coughs. “Um. Ugly.”

“Oh...” Jisung realizes, glancing down, that he must have worn it to sleep last night since it was cold. “It’s not even that ugly!” he says, looking at Minho’s own attire—not the farmer clothes he had worn coming out of the fireplace, and not the luxurious palace robes Jisung had been expecting to see, but rather the clothes Minho had worn the last time Jisung saw him—one of Jisung’s own warm sweatshirt and pants. 

Minho’s head shyly ducks down as Jisung eyes him, and he chooses that time to start picking up all the books he had knocked over leaving the bookshelf. 

Jisung softly smiles. 

A man just appeared in his room, and he is _definitely_ not Santa. And Jisung doesn’t even really celebrate Christmas, but he thinks this is the best gift to ever get.

\---

“I’m just glad you’re back,” Jisung says for probably the third time that day already—and all he’s done is brush his teeth and then help Minho put the rest of the books back on his shelf.

Minho laughs. “Yeah, I know.” Then his eyes soften. Melting sun. “I’m glad I came back too.”

Jisung rocks back and forth on his heels, stalling.

“You know, I could have gone back into the book a long time before,” Minho tells him. “I figured out how to that day at the library. But I did not want to.”

“Oh,” Jisung replies.

“I tried to get a job at the library but they turned me down. And then the guilt started eating me up and I felt so bad, so I thought that it really was best for me to go back. But... I guess I was wrong. I like it a lot more here,” he confesses.

“I like it a lot more with you here too,” Jisung replies. Silence hangs from the air, but it isn’t stiff. Just two people letting the weight of their words sink in.

“Wanna see the cats?” Jisung asks.

\---

“You gave them a _house,_ ” Minho says, awestruck, as he follows Jisung outside, his breaths coming out in puffs against the cold winter air.

“Shelter,” Jisung corrects. “It’s not that fancy,” he says, shoving his hands into his pockets and shrugging nonchalantly. 

The cats are curled up inside again in a sort of yin-yang circle, backs rising and falling softly with their breathing.

“So what are their names?” Minho asks him. “Wait, this one was… Ghost, right?” 

“Yeah,” Jisung tells him. “The other is Pumpkin.”

Minho raises an eyebrow. “Both of those sound very… Halloween?” he unsurely says. “But... I like them.”

“Good,” Jisung says. “Because after calling them by those names for months I’m not going to rename them.”

\---

“Huh.” Minho hovers in front of the fridge. More specifically, the note tacked on there. 

“Oh. Yeah,” Jisung says. “Yeah.”

“It’s probably already lunchtime now. But should I make some pancakes anyway?” Minho suggests. 

“We can make them together,” Jisung says, and they do. And Ghost and Pumpkin each get a little, too.

(Warm food is definitely even warmer when shared amongst others.)

\---

“What is… Christmas?” Minho asks, squinting at the laptop screen. 

“Uhhhhhh,” Jisung struggles. It’s hard to explain the origins of the holiday when the world Minho came from doesn’t know what religion is, either. 

“It generally involves gift-giving? And like… a cheery festive vibe? Y’know?”

Minho stares at him blankly. “Okay,” he says. 

“The internet would probably explain it better than I could,” Jisung suggests, gesturing to the laptop. “Just saying.”

“Thanks,” Minho replies.

“I have an idea,” Jisung suddenly says, feeling particularly ambitious. He gets up to dig around the storage closet and dusty boxes of ornaments—he hasn’t decorated for the holiday in years but he can’t bring himself to throw the stuff away, either—and pulls out a sprig of mistletoe.

“Ew,” Minho wrinkles his nose. “Why do you have _fake_ plants.”

Jisung cackles at the disgusted expression on his face. “There’s this Christmas tradition that if you hang this up and two people happen to get caught beneath it then they should kiss for good luck.”

“I see,” Minho slowly says, glancing away. “Um. That is an invitation, right?”

“If you want it to be,” Jisung replies. He thinks that they are on the same page. Literally the same page too, now that Minho is here.

“I do,” Minho replies bluntly. “But I think I would prefer to not see that _thing_ again.”

Jisung sticks the mistletoe back into the box and rather eagerly shoves the closet door closed.

“Now?” he asks, wringing his hands and leaning forward just a bit so Minho gets the gist.

Minho fondly laughs in response, and Jisung lets his eyes drift shut as Minho bends down to meet him. 

Pent-up longing is somehow soft and sweet, and the way Minho’s arms curls around him is snug and comfortable as he draws out the kiss, tugging on Jisung’s lips without the pressure of limited time. 

Maybe that book couldn’t catch fire but his heart certainly can, and not the type of all-consuming destructive fire either.

This is an enveloping warmth and a shared sense of cozy and righteous belonging. Like being wrapped in, dare he say it, a blanket burrito. 

“Welcome home,” Jisung whispers, and he means it.

\---

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> ahhh if you got here thank you so much for reading! to be honest i scrapped my original idea and started writing this one with a lot less time left, so the quality could be better... but uh.. nonetheless, comments and kudos greatly appreciated!
> 
> ... and my [twitter](https://twitter.com/in_a_rabbithole) if you want to be friends :DD
> 
> also, please check out the other works as well as all the art people have created for this event [here](https://twitter.com/minsungseason/status/1320176826048671744)!


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